Have you ever learned something that cracked open your mind, tickled your curiosity, and marked a change, even if slight, in the way you do something you’ve always done?
Recently, I had the opportunity to go on a guided hike at Caprock Canyon State Park, the third largest state park in Texas, located up in the blurry line between the Panhandle and West Texas near Quitaque, Texas, home to fewer than 350 people.
The hike was advertised as a color hike, but I didn’t think too much of the implications. I arrived to the visitor center at 9:50am. The hike led by a park volunteer guide was set to begin 10 miles away at 10am. Flustered from being late, frustrated that I didn’t have time to pull into every pull out between the center and the trailhead parking lot, and fueled up on a bit too much iced latte from the great local coffee joint in Quitaque, I showed up at 10:08 just grateful that the hike hadn’t left without me.
The next two hours took me along for far more than a hike. Amber, the excellent park volunteer, willingly led an audience of one - just me (and Rose my dog) - on the hike through the first mile of the South Loop as an out-and-back hike. Immediately after embarking on the trail, a large millipede ambled across our path. “Black!”, she exclaimed. She then proceeded to dive deep into color theory, telling me how in physics and on the light spectrum, black is actually the absence of all color. She challenged me to think about where in nature black - or what we perceive as black - naturally occurs challenging that it rarely, if ever does. Lingering in thought and in amazement of how the millipede’s feet moved in such coordinated fashion, she told me that black represents “the unknown, mystery, the deep not knowing and uncertainty of life.” She suggested this appearance of the millipede was “good luck” and meant that life was inviting me into the mystery and so suggesting I was capable of being squarely in the unknown. Anyone who knows me, how I’m wired, or what I was facing that fateful day knows that this resonated, and unsurprisingly I was hooked.
From there we hiked at the pace of inquiry, observation, attentiveness, and awe. At the speed of:
“What do you think dug that hole?”
“Is that scat still warm? Who left it? Oooh, there’s another, who are we following?”
“What time of day does that flower blossom?”
“When was the last time those flowers were here? Do you think the recent rains following a really dry spell made for the perfect conditions for that to come up for the first time in years?”
“Look! A caterpillar, oh wait, another, oh wait, this tree is filled with them, look!”
“Why do you think the rocks shift from red to white at the top? What could that mean?”
“Are the layers of sedimentation poetry in rock form?”
“Ooh look, more scat. Who left this one?!”
“When do you think water last ran through here?”
“Oh, if I were a bison, I’d take a nap there! Let’s go see how much cooler it feels in the shade there.”
Amber continued to teach me about color and brought questions and ideas forth for us to contemplate as we walked, my feet becoming red from the fine and loose iron-laded dirt being kicked around by my chaco-clad feet. “Indigo signifies intuitive guidance and clarity,” she said as we marveled at the day flowers in bloom. White is peace of mind. Green represents unconditional love, “Creator’s way of reminding us how much we are loved,” she said. Blue means using your voice and speaking your truth, though that then led to a conversation again about physics and light and whether the sky is really blue and when, if ever, we see true blue in nature. She told me about how orange is all about motivation, hunger, ambition. We found ourselves again lost in wonder, this time contemplating if the orange of the canyons, bluffs, and buttes fueled the survival of the people who used to live off this land in a way very few do anymore.
After our hike ended, I drove back through the park, slowly, stopping at every pull out. The park’s bison, Texas’ only free-roaming wild bison herd, had split up and were spread out and on the move. So I lingered, longer, allowing the strength of the largest plains ungulate to speak to me. As I listened to their grunts and grumbles, the rut certainly close if not already underway, I wondered, what does brown mean? And in that question, I found myself satisfied without an answer, fully present in contemplation and curiosity, completely slack jawed at the vast beauty of Caprock Canyon State Park.
Bison at Caprock Canyon State Park, Texas
